Unforgiving Years (38 page)

Ilse came out of her room, lugging her pail again. At the sight of the newcomers she caught her breath, hesitated for a quarter of a second, and walked up to the pump. “
Guten Morgen
,” she said, fixing the enemy with a long frosty stare. The driver rolled his shoulders. “
Guten Tag
,” he replied caustically from beneath his helmet. He was holding a shiny metal wrench in his fist. Ilse wondered whether he might not crack her on the back of head with it as she bent over the tap. She reckoned it wouldn’t be enough to kill her, but then there was the cooking and the housework … The sound of Franz’s crutch making pebbles fly was audible close by as he labored up a low rampart of rubble. He surged into view in front of a bearded officer, who lowered his revolver when he saw him. “Okay!”
¹
greeted Franz cordially. “Hello!” said the bearded officer, sounding perplexed. Instead of looking at the conquerors, Franz turned his attention to their machine, making small clucks of appreciation through pursed lips. “Well, well,” he coughed, in a bid to get maximum mileage from his ten words of English. With his good hand, he took the liberty of prodding one of the tires. Superb piece of manufacturing! Synthetic? The guy with the beard offered him a cigarette. “Thank you.” “Speak English?” “No.” The crippled vet’s face split into an friendly grin. Herr Schiff was approaching with measured step, leaning on the antler handle of his cane. The Schulzes all emerged from their lair together, the wife, the children, the man in his cap and sweater. Other people were appearing across the ruins like larvae emerging from the soil — and they were indistinguishable, on the whole, from the inhabitants of Chicago’s slums or any other poverty-stricken corner of the world. A rather elegant woman, wearing a Red Cross armband on her jacket sleeve, climbed down from a sort of chicken coop stuck to the side of a blasted building. A thin, hairy young man, lost in an outsize tramp’s overcoat on which he had pinned a red, white, and blue ribbon, jumped off the ladder and loped unsteadily toward the jeep. His wild eyes and big, gesticulating hands would have made him quite frightening, had this been the time for fear. Everyone stared at him. On his way, he knocked over a little Schulze, pushed Ilse aside, blurted “French war prisoner!”
²
in a voice from the other side of the grave, and opened his arms wide … One of the Americans punched him lightly in the ribs, made him stagger, caught him in a bear hug, and the two men clung to each other as though wrestling, about to collapse in a heap. “Christ almighty!” gasped Alain. “I don’t believe it!” Someone was slapping him on the back hard enough to dislodge his lungs. Someone else stuck a cigarette between his chattering teeth. There were friendly faces in broad daylight, USA insignia, a genuine jeep, white rags snapping in the sunshine as far as you could see, an emaciated Brigitte smiling for eternity on her schoolgirl bed, with something of Botticelli about the hardened oval of her chin; there was a hail of luminous stones falling overhead, each stone an idea, an unbreakable reality, an incredible certainty, a grenade of rapture which could never explode … We’re alive, rescued, delivered, how hollow the words sounded! Victorious, does that make me a victor? Shivering, gripped by a burning chill, Alain chewed on his cigarette. “Speak French,
³
anybody? Quick!
Schnell, schnell
!” The fat important one with the green sunglasses said, “
Je parle fran-çais
… Journalist. Paris.” Alain drew himself up before him like a marionette, like remorse itself, crying in a low voice, “The hell with Paris! The guys in jail … Did you think about the jail?” “It’s bound to be occupied by now,” said the journalist, who had no idea. Alain’s vehemence was spent. The nurse took his arm. “We thought of that too,” she said gently. “Oh, you did …” Alain tensed again. We the impotent, we the moles under the ground, we the less than nothings! “You’re special, Erna,” he said, spitting shreds of tobacco. The green sunglasses turned to Erna Laub with amusement. Heavily powdered, her lips rouged, the nurse looked almost insolent, as if wearing a Prussian mask. Make mental note of this vignette. “Health service, Fraülein?” “Underground,” the woman replied. “What?” “You understood me perfectly, I hope.”

There was a growing circle of people around the jeep. Here, as elsewhere, the vanquished were behaving with curious familiarity. The kids, fairly well dressed, however did they manage? The women, worn to a shadow … The journalist chose Herr Schiff, an average elderly German, former officer and civil servant by the looks of him; he beckoned him to come over. Schiff, fulminating against the universe, didn’t budge. The journalist moved toward him. The children, interested, stepped out of the way. The journalist introduced himself in passable German. He mentioned his press agency, whose name meant less to Herr Schiff than the canals on Mars. The old man introduced himself in turn: “Professor Herman-Helmut Schiff.” “If you’ll allow me,” the reporter said, scrawling a few shorthand signs into his notebook.

“Now then, what do you think about the Americans?”

A didactic question could never catch the professor off guard, for he was constantly putting them to himself, and supplying interminable answers in the form of monologues upon eugenics, the world conceived as a representation, the genius of race, or the political errors of Julius Caesar and Wilhelm II.

“A very great people, the Americans … The United States is presently the foremost industrial power in the world, and superior at waging war … On the other hand, there is a certain lack of social cohesion and spiritual tradition …”

“You think so?”

“Beyond a doubt,” Schiff declaimed, getting into his lecturer’s stride. “You will realize that in fifty years.”

“Phew, we got time to turn around then.”

A swift pencil and shorthand pad recorded the schoolmaster’s extravagant ramblings for the benefit of countless newspaper readers.

“Do you people feel guilty?”

If there was one emotion which had never been experienced by Herr Schiff (at least not since his adolescent religious crises) in his half century of diligent service, that emotion was guilt. It is healthy to live one’s life in the meticulous fulfillment of duty. The school-teacher cocked his head obligingly. “Pardon me. I didn’t quite catch … ?”

“Guilty for the war?”

Schiff’s gaze swept the horizon of the broken city, strewn with the dead doves of humiliation. The grander generalizations existed for him on a different plane from everyday reality. The Second World War was already down as a great historical tragedy — a quasi-mythological one — which neither Mommsen, Hans Delbrück, Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Oswald Spengler, or
Mein Kampf
could elucidate entirely … The sons immolated themselves upon the altar of blind gods. A new, unholy war, unworthy of human nobility, had begun with the destruction of Altstadt; and this war alone existed in reality.

“Guilty?” Herr Schiff said in flinty tones, with the air of a livid turkey-cock. “Guilty of that?” (And he bobbed his head at the surrounding devastation.)

“No,” the reporter said patiently, not quite grasping the response, “guilty for the war.”

“And you,” Herr Schiff retorted, “do you feel guilty for this?”

Franz could not contain his delight. He slapped his thigh uproariously. “
Wunderbar
! Wonderful old idiot!” Alain’s hairy face expressed furious disgust.

“My dear Professor,” the journalist began, striving for an offensive politeness, “you started this war … You bombed Coventry.”

“I?” said Schiff, in frank astonishment. “I?”

Several women were following the exchange from the sidelines, noting the green glasses and heavy mustache of the American and Herr Schiff’s upstanding attitude. They were too discreet to come close enough to hear properly, but it seemed certain that important matters for the neighborhood were being discussed. Franz butted in unceremoniously: “Well, I fought in the war, as perhaps you can tell by looking at me. I give you my faithful, one hundred percent amputee’s word of honor that I didn’t start it.”

“Herr Professor,” whispered a daring old lady in a black lace cap, “do ask them whether the soup kitchens will be allowed to continue? Or do the American gentlemen intend to feed the city?” She spoke the last three words more loudly, to make sure that the authority would hear them. The reporter’s eyes popped with outrage behind his shades. No shame, no guilt, not a shred! These folks seem to think we come over, leaving a hundred thousand of our boys underground along the way, just to sort out their next meal! He turned on the old lady.

“Madam, have you ever heard of a place called Dachau?”

Intimidated by his tone, but happy to help out, she quavered enthusiastically: “Oh yes, it’s a pretty little town in Bavaria, where they held interesting popular festivals in the old days …”

“That’s all?”

“Yes, sir …” (The old lady blanched at the covert fury of the question.)

“What about the concentration camp?”

“Ooh, that may be, I can’t tell you about that, I’m afraid … I so seldom read the newspapers.”

Franz was grinning maniacally. Alain’s face too was that of a madman, a dangerous one. The old lady felt inexplicable tears wetting the corners of her eyes. She murmured, very humbly, “I beg the gentleman to excuse me if I offended him,” for these were clearly military persons of influence. Schiff was aware that his height, his age, and tonight’s thirty barbiturate pills gave him the edge over the other man, whose exasperation was patent. “I bid you good day, mister journalist!” he stated with pointed courtesy, and turned his back.

“They don’t look like bad men,” a woman was saying. Schiff paused, looking sternly down his nose at this housewife. “The Americans are not bad men,” he informed her sententiously. “No more than are the Chinese, dear Madame. But we have been defeated, Madame, and you must never forget it.” “Certainly not, Herr Professor.”

The burly officer with the round beard, like a sailor in an old-fashioned illustration, hailed the reporter. “We’re leaving, old man! Happy with your little interview?” “They are staggeringly unconscious of everything,” the journalist said, climbing back into the jeep. “Well, if you’re looking for consciousness from bombed-out towns …”

Ilse carried her full bucket inside. Franz inhaled the fragrance of a cigarette from across the seas, incontestably superior to the Party cadres’ special-issue reserve rolled with the last of the Bulgarian tobacco. “They take good care of themselves, these victors. Victors always do,” he said to himself, feeling queerly elated and at the same time inert. An exquisite satisfaction weighted his whole body down with languor, as though he had just made love well, his arms and legs intact, with a vigorous, clean-smelling woman. It was only an hour ago that Herr Blasch, vicious dog of the Special Surveillance Unit, was getting ready to mount his bicycle, knapsack on back, swaddled in musette bags, pockets bursting with banknotes and forged documents, when suddenly he saw the barrel of a revolver appear between his eyes at the same time as he heard the cripple say, “Have a nice trip, Herr Blasch!” amplified by the trumpet blast of the Last Judgment … The ants were presently taking care of this turd of officialdom. “I sure fixed him!” thought Franz sarcastically. “My war’s over. The sun’s out.”

* * *

Stupendous lawn! The thick grass was pampered as men nowhere are! Mowed to the perfect length, watered every day, and doubtless nourished with vitamin-rich chemical fertilizers … The lawn sloped down to the river, on the far side of which more gardens rose toward their villas. I’ll be damned! Some people were living the good life right up until yesterday. People for whom “the Great Reich in danger” was more than a hollow phrase!

In every war there is a rear that holds better than the front, a rear fat with noble sentiments, creature comforts, and lucrative deals; this rear, which balances the front, makes the insanity total … The beaches of California still exhibit, in season, a full complement of pretty women with smiling thighs: such is the natural order of things. After all, there’s philosophical solace to be found in the fact that some still live while others die, an obvious improvement on everyone dying … But it is no longer possible to embark upon a coherent line of reasoning without falling into absurdity. Thinking this way, Alain felt indulgence, tinged with temptation, toward those pretty Californians. What had they to do with these people, this upper crust of profiteering slavers? He floundered in contradictions. The villa next door belonged to a Standartenführer (to be killed, no discussion!) whose two daughters were said to be charming … Innocent, you think? Innocent? He dimly hoped they would fall into the hands of the most brutal convicts … Have I become a brute myself?

Alain, after waking between fresh sheets, had just shaved. He was “swimming” inside his new clothes, but the fabric was luxurious and the trouser pleats ironed … This manicured landscape, twenty miles outside the corpselike city, carpets over the parquet flooring, all the faultless appointments of a civilized gentleman’s home … A bastard, in any case, the civilized gentleman: the worthy pastor, a Lutheran and a Nazi for good measure, a fat Christian, blesser of executioners, is probably trudging along the highways of defeat right now, among the uniforms at last marked out for a just destruction … Alain stood before a crucifix, his face blurred by sadness. “He made a proper fool out of you, Nazarene, didn’t he, this pastor of your flock of bastards?”

The night before, Alain and his companions, having entered the picture-perfect little town like a gang of scary tramps, were shocked at the sight of prosperous homes with well-tended parterres of flowers and windows nestling in ivy. It was such a strange spectacle that they had to force themselves to enter a garden and knock on a door. As soon as their fists touched this door, they wanted to smash it in. A white-haired woman opened it. “
Was wünschen Sie, meine Herren?
What do the gentlemen wish? The reverend is out …” Now they were “gentlemen,” now they could have “wishes”! The old housekeeper recognized a Dutch laborer among the group, who began shouting hysterically at her: “Out, you bet he’s out, and he won’t be coming back neither, the old swine!” A torrent of abuse followed. Fortunately, having heard nothing but seemly language during her forty years in service, Frau Hermenegilda failed to comprehend the epithets directed at her. She was deafened by bursts of shrill, stallion laughter. Hairy paws were almost on her, like in one of those horror films. Images of rape and murder flashed through her crafty child’s brain. Must push the door, slam it shut!
Mein Gott
! Several beggars shoved past her. The Frenchman said in a voice you didn’t argue with: “Get out, Madame. Take your clothes, your guts, and go. I give you ten minutes to vanish, you old tittle-tattle. This house is requisitioned, understand?” Requisitioned is a word everyone understands immediately, and here the hairy young man’s rough German was as plain as day. But “old tittle-tattle”? What did that mean? Was it very rude? Frau Hermenegilda, backed against the wall, clutching the silver crucifix on her bosom, drew courage from the fact that requisitions are legal procedures — the reverend himself drove a requisitioned automobile … “Might I see a warrant, sir?” This reasonable query opened the floodgates. A gorilla in rags lurched into the drawing room and, grabbing a valuable bronze, hurled it against the family portrait. The noise of splintering glass was followed by that of imprecations and a scuffle, as the others fought to overpower the vandal. A demonic mouth was snarling into the old retainer’s ear, “
Raus
! Get out! Clear off, you sawdust fart, you old boiled tarantula! If you weren’t so puckered up I’d … Beat it or I’ll kick your ass inside out!
Raus
!” What godless bandits were these? Frau Hermenegilda shrieked for help, but she lost her voice and all that came out was a plaintive meow. A flat blow, as one beats a carpet, silenced her; when she came to her senses her cheek was swelling, the doors of neighboring villas were being kicked in and the Frenchman was leading her to the kitchen, saying, “Put a wet towel on your face, there’s nothing to fear, Madame, just get your things and scram, that’s all we ask.” He cuffed the Dutchman in passing. “Leave the prune alone, Petersen, we’re not that desperate …”